Book Image

Python Data Structures and Algorithms

By : Benjamin Baka
Book Image

Python Data Structures and Algorithms

By: Benjamin Baka

Overview of this book

Data structures allow you to organize data in a particular way efficiently. They are critical to any problem, provide a complete solution, and act like reusable code. In this book, you will learn the essential Python data structures and the most common algorithms. With this easy-to-read book, you will be able to understand the power of linked lists, double linked lists, and circular linked lists. You will be able to create complex data structures such as graphs, stacks and queues. We will explore the application of binary searches and binary search trees. You will learn the common techniques and structures used in tasks such as preprocessing, modeling, and transforming data. We will also discuss how to organize your code in a manageable, consistent, and extendable way. The book will explore in detail sorting algorithms such as bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, and merge sort. By the end of the book, you will learn how to build components that are easy to understand, debug, and use in different applications.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
5
Stacks and Queues
7
Hashing and Symbol Tables

Binary trees


A binary tree is one in which each node has a maximum of two children. Binary trees are very common and we shall use them to build up a BST implementation in Python.

The following figure is an example of a binary tree with 5 being the root node:

Each child is identified as being the right or left child of its parent. Since the parent node is also a node by itself, each node will hold a reference to a right and left node even if the nodes do not exist.

A regular binary tree has no rules as to how elements are arranged in the tree. It only satisfies the condition that each node should have a maximum of two children.

Binary search trees

A binary search tree (BST) is a special kind of a binary tree. That is, it is a tree that is structurally a binary tree. Functionally, it is a tree that stores its nodes in such a way to be able to search through the tree efficiently.

There is a structure to a BST. For a given node with a value, all the nodes in the left sub-tree are less than or equal...